Union Man

A new biography of an unlikely American statesman.

Seward came to see himself as the chief conciliator between the rebellious Southern states and punitive Northerners.Credit Photograph by Bettmann / Corbis

On the afternoon of July 23, 1846, William H. Seward rose to give his closing argument in a local murder case. Recently returned from Albany, where he had spent two terms as governor of New York, he had resumed his law practice in Auburn, a hundred and seventy miles west. He was defending a twenty-three-year-old black man who had confessed to killing a white family of four. A mob had come close to lynching the defendant, and Seward was warned that, as the defense counsel, he could face retaliation. “There is a busy war around me, to drive me from defending and securing a fair trial for the negro Freeman,” Seward wrote to his closest adviser, Thurlow Weed. At sixteen, William Freeman had been wrongly charged with horse stealing and sent to Auburn Prison, where he was beaten with a wooden board until his skull cracked and he lost his hearing. Seward told Weed that Freeman “is deaf, deserted, ignorant, and his conduct is unexplainable on any principle of sanity. It is natural that he trusts me to defend him.” Weed urged Seward against it, but Seward’s wife, Frances, commended his decision, and assisted him in his research on the insanity defense, a novel legal tactic at the time.

Seward told the jurors that he was appalled, as they were, by the massacre of “a whole family, just, gentle, and pure,” but he argued that Freeman, who was clearly unstable after having been brutalized himself, was “still your brother, and mine, and bears equally with us the proudest inheritance of our race—the image of our Maker.” The jury was unmoved, and the judge sentenced Freeman to hang. Yet newspapers across the country printed Seward’s courtroom arguments, and they were applauded by a progressive constituency throughout the North. The case helped re-launch his career in politics, a line of work that he described in his memoir as “the important and engrossing business of the country.” He went on to become, as Walter Stahr shows in his masterly new biography, “Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man” (Simon & Schuster), one of the most influential and polarizing American politicians of the nineteenth century.

William Henry Seward, known as Henry, grew up in rural New York, in a slave-owning family, although his parents, alone among their neighbors, allowed the slaves’ children to go to school, and, Seward recalled, they “never uttered an expression that could tend to make me think that the negro was inferior to the white person.” In 1820, when Seward graduated from Union College, in Schenectady, the students were inflamed by the Missouri Compromise, which allowed slavery in Western territories south of the Missouri line. Seward gave a commencement address, with Southern graduates on one side of the dais and Northerners on the other, in which he introduced an argument that he developed during the next forty years: the North and the South should agree to pursue the “gradual emancipation” of slaves.

In 1834, Seward and Weed became founding members of the Whig Party, formed to combat the corrupt Presidency of Andrew Jackson and his followers in the Democratic Party. But, as governor from 1839 to 1842, Seward incited the wrath of anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic Whigs by increasing funding for public education for all children, advocating citizenship for immigrants, and passing a state law giving fugitive slaves the right to a trial. As a newly arrived senator in 1850, he delivered a three-hour stem-winder before packed galleries, denouncing the Fugitive Slave Act and disagreeing with his illustrious elders Clay, Webster, and Calhoun about the extension of slavery. Appealing to the Founders’ principles of union, justice, welfare, and liberty, he announced that “there is a higher law than the Constitution.” He led a generational change in the chamber, where Radical Republicans rejected the compromises the triumvirate had forged on slavery. Those compromises, Seward said, arose from “the want of moral courage to meet this question of emancipation as we ought.” They would lead to civil war, not prevent it.

The first shot may have been fired at Fort Sumter, in 1861, but the Civil War had its origins in Kansas, in 1854, when the Illinois senator Stephen Douglas pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, allowing slavery in the vast Nebraska territory north of the Missouri line. “Bleeding Kansas” split in two, with pro-slavery advocates setting up their legislature in a schoolhouse just west of Missouri and anti-slavery settlers gathering in Topeka. Seward had predicted such an outcome four years earlier, and he helped lead the opposition to the bill in the Senate.

Seward’s anti-slavery sentiment was deep enough that he and Frances harbored fugitives in their home. Frances, the well-educated daughter of a judge, had grown up in Auburn, and her political views were even more fiercely held than her husband’s. She and Seward gave financial support to Frederick Douglass’s abolitionist newspaper and cultivated a friendship with Harriet Tubman. In November, 1855, when Seward was in Auburn and Frances was away, he wrote to her that “ ‘the underground railroad’ works wonderfully. Two passengers came here last night.” He had recently won reëlection to the Senate and was considering a run for the Presidency. Given his ambitions and his high public profile, flouting federal law in this way was a particularly risky enterprise.

Not long afterward, having decided that the Whig Party was weak and outmoded, Seward became a primary force in the birth of the Republican Party. Its immediate purpose was to arrest the spread of slavery and, as he put it, to unseat the “privileged class”—Southern slaveholders, who still dominated the government. In Rochester, New York, in October, 1858, Seward declared that the slave states and the free states were engaged in an “irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces.” The speech caused a frenzy in the press, with one paper applauding it as “clear, calm, sagacious, profound, impregnable,” and another denouncing Seward as a “repulsive abolitionist.” Four months earlier, in Springfield, Illinois, a forty-nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln had given his remarkably similar “House Divided” speech, to a mostly local audience, and he went on to lose the Senate election to Douglas.

By 1860, Senator Seward was the country’s preëminent Republican, and a familiar figure around Washington. Fifty-eight years old, he was invariably dishevelled, in an old jacket and trousers that hung limply on his narrow frame. He had keen blue eyes, deep-set and overhung with unruly gray eyebrows, and a nose that jutted out from his face like the prow of a ship. A reporter for the Times of London later described him as “a subtle, quick man, rejoicing in power, given to perorate and to oracular utterances, fond of badinage and bursting with the importance of state mysteries.”

Like many in his party, Seward was shocked when he lost the Presidential nomination to Abraham Lincoln, whom he furiously described as “a little Illinois lawyer.” But some Republicans had feared that his militant reputation would prevent him from winning in key moderate states, including Illinois. (In the South, he was regarded as a dangerous foe. A Mississippi congressman warned that, if Seward was elected President, we “will tear this Constitution to pieces, and look to our guns for justice.”) Seward, though, had a trait that was rare in Washington: an ability to curb his rancor. He threw himself into campaigning for Lincoln, and, more than anyone, helped secure his victory.

A month later, Lincoln wrote to Seward asking him to be Secretary of State, shrewdly commending his “integrity, ability, learning, and great experience.” When Lincoln arrived in the capital, shortly before his Inauguration, Seward officiously escorted him to the White House to see President Buchanan, took him to church, hosted him for dinner, and gave him a tour of the House and the Senate. A writer for the New York Herald noted, “The ‘irrepressible’ senator thinks he has Mr. Lincoln sure, and delights in introducing him to everybody, on the same principle which leads children to display their new toys.”

Seward’s buoyancy and his unapologetic indulgence in claret and cigars were almost as much remarked upon as his declamations in the Senate. But, as the country splintered, he assumed a role that belied his reputation as an extremist. After Lincoln’s election, South Carolina withdrew from the Union—quickly followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Even at his most provocative, Seward had never advocated immediate abolition. He believed that Southerners could be persuaded to see slavery “give way to the salutary instructions of economy, and to the ripening influences of humanity.” Now he infuriated Radical Republicans by working up until the eve of the war to keep the border states from seceding.

On January 12, 1861, three days after his appointment became public, Seward gave a momentous speech in the Senate on the importance of the Union. Invoking Jefferson to explain why he had departed from his “cherished convictions,” he said that politicians must consider not only their personal views but also “those with whom we must necessarily act.” He even advised amending the Constitution so that Congress could not “abolish or interfere with slavery in any state.” Members of the Senate, defying protocol, erupted into applause. Frances Seward, though, disapproved. “Eloquent as your speech was, it fails to meet with the entire approval of those who love you best,” she wrote from Auburn. “Compromise based on the idea that the preservation of the Union is more important than the liberty of nearly 4,000,000 human beings cannot be right.”

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Lincoln had few of the insecurities that hobble far more experienced politicians. He surrounded himself with seasoned if fractious advisers, and during his first weekend in Washington he asked Seward to look over his Inaugural Address. Salmon Chase, soon to be Treasury Secretary and a Seward antagonist, had been urging Lincoln to take a hard line with the South. But Seward thought that Lincoln’s bristling tone was all wrong. He compiled a six-page list of proposed revisions, including a section on the Dred Scott decision, in which the President deplored “the despotism of the few life officers composing the Court.” Lincoln accepted many of Seward’s changes, most important his elimination of the bellicose conclusion: “You can forbear the assault upon [the government], I can not shrink from the defense of it. With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of ‘Shall it be peace, or a sword?’ ” Seward urged Lincoln to conclude, instead, with “some words of affection,” of “calm and cheerful confidence.” Excising Lincoln’s last lines, he substituted his own:

Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly they must not, I am sure they will not be broken. The mystic chords which proceeding from so many battle fields and so many patriot graves pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.

Lincoln took the sentiment, stripped it of its orotundity, and produced one of the most stirring political statements in American history:

Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

It was the start of a remarkably successful collaboration between a President and his Secretary of State. Lincoln told Seward early on, “I shall have to depend upon you for taking care of these matters of foreign affairs, of which I know so little, and with which I reckon you are familiar.” That meant, above all, keeping a cotton-dependent Britain and France from recognizing the Confederacy as a legitimate government. In November, 1861, Seward faced his first test when Charles Wilkes, an intemperate Union captain, fired upon an unarmed British mail ship, the R.M.S. Trent, and then boarded and captured the Confederacy’s envoys to Britain and France, James Mason and John Slidell. In his biography, Stahr describes the immediate aftermath of the incident as “the most dramatic and tense weeks in transatlantic relations of the entire Civil War,” and calls the Trent affair “the Cuban missile crisis of the nineteenth century: a moment when the United States faced possible war with the world’s other major power.”

Seward knew that the Union could not survive if Britain declared war. He began working the back channels, privately assuring British officials that Wilkes had acted on his own. One of Seward’s many influential friends in the press was Henry Raymond, the editor of the New York Times and an active member of the Republican Party. On December 17th, in words that could have sprung directly from Seward’s pen, the newspaper editorialized that “the American people do not desire a war with England—that none but secessionists and those who sympathize with them, are disposed to a needless rupture of our friendly relations with any foreign power.” Two days later, Seward persuaded Britain’s ambassador to turn over an unofficial copy of the British government’s demands. Seward promised that he would share the document with no one but the President, and won a little more time to prepare the Administration’s response.

On Christmas morning, Seward presented to the Cabinet his draft response to the British, carefully balancing the conflicting imperatives of foreign and domestic policy. Britain insisted that the Union apologize for violating international law and promptly release the prisoners, but Wilkes was being fêted in Northern cities as a hero. The President and the rest of the Cabinet, alert to popular sentiment, were also repulsed by the idea of bowing to Britain’s terms. Seward agreed that Wilkes had legally searched the Trent and taken the prisoners. Nevertheless, he said, citing a precedent established by Monroe, Wilkes had improperly allowed the ship to continue to England rather than taking it into port, where the matter could be settled in court.

Lincoln at first balked, and said that he would prepare his own letter, but the next day he came around to Seward’s approach. Stahr, the biographer of John Jay, another underappreciated American diplomat who conducted delicate negotiations with the British, is generally restrained to a fault. Here, though, he concludes that the letter Lincoln had in mind probably would have led Great Britain to declare war on the United States.

After the Trent crisis, Seward’s relationship with the President grew closer, a source of bitterness among Cabinet members already predisposed to resent him. Stahr draws frequently on the spiteful but astute diary entries of Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy, who emerges as one of Seward’s most revealing foils. In September, 1862, Welles wrote that Seward “runs to the President two or three times a day, gets his ear, gives him his tongue, makes himself interesting, and artfully contrives to dispose of many measures or give them direction independent of his associates.”

Seward had come to see himself as the chief conciliator between the rebellious Southern states and punitive Northerners. “Somebody must be in a position to mollify and moderate,” he wrote to Weed. “That is the task of the President and the Secretary of State.” Yet he often ended up infuriating members of his own party. Charles Sumner, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and an old friend, accused Seward of the “grossest mismanagement” of foreign affairs, and taunted his preening and “prancing.” Mary Todd Lincoln told her husband that she hated to see him “let that hypocrite, Seward, twine you around his finger as if you were a skein of thread.” In September, 1861, a group of New Yorkers warned Lincoln about Seward’s drinking and smoking, a charge that Lincoln waved aside. A year later, a delegation of Radical Republicans from New York went to Washington with ostensible evidence of Seward’s leniency toward Southern “traitors.” Lincoln retorted, “It is plain enough what you want. You want to get Seward out of the cabinet.” He said that every one of them would be content to see the country ruined “if you could turn out Seward.”

As the scheming continued, Seward only rose in Lincoln’s estimation, and Lincoln in his. Gideon Welles judged that “the qualities of Seward are almost the precise opposite of the President.” But their temperamental differences—Lincoln the brooding, lonely depressive; Seward the gregarious optimist—complemented each other like those of a comfortable married couple. They liked nothing better than to relax together in the evening. Seward’s son Frederick, who served as his Assistant Secretary of State, recalled that, as the two “sat together by the fireside, or in the carriage, the conversation between them, however it began, always drifted back into the same channel—the progress of the great national struggle. Both loved humor, and however trite the theme, Lincoln always found some quaint illustration from his western life, and Seward some case in point, from his long public career, to give it new light.” Seward, in a tone of mock regret, told a British journalist, with Lincoln present, that he had “always wondered how any man could ever get to be President of the United States with so few vices. The President, you know, I regret to say, neither drinks nor smokes.” Seward, like Lincoln, was a practiced raconteur, and Lincoln told one visitor, “Mr. Seward is limited to a couple of stories which from repeating he believes are true.” Their over-all agreement about the conduct of the war, and their habit of checking each other’s rasher impulses, defined Administration policy.

In July, 1862, when Lincoln presented the Cabinet with a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, Seward warned that it could prompt foreign governments to intervene on behalf of the South, and said that it should be delivered at a time of military strength, not weakness. “Proclamations are paper,” he wrote to Frances, “without the support of armies.” Lincoln was persuaded to wait. The preliminary Proclamation was signed on September 22, 1862, after the Union victory at Antietam.

“Nineteenth-century elections were played by rough rules,” Stahr writes laconically, and Seward knew exactly how to exploit them. After the New York Draft Riots, in 1863, and a string of defeats by Union troops, many people in the North began agitating for peace. As the election of 1864 approached, even loyal Republicans considered calling for a convention to nominate another candidate. That August, Weed went to the White House to tell Seward and Lincoln that the election was lost. Seward disagreed, and deployed Weed, the consummate party boss, to activate what Gideon Welles aptly described as the “vicious New York school of politics.” Welles’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy was enlisted to tell workers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard that if they didn’t vote for Lincoln they would lose their jobs. Lincoln did his part, too, appointing “a few Seward-Weed men to key posts in New York City.” Welles, meanwhile, scribbled in his diary about the “miserable intrigues of Weed and Seward.” Outmaneuvered by his nemesis and undercut by a subordinate, Welles wrote after the results came in, “Seward was quite exultant—feels strong and self-gratified. Says this Administration is wise, energetic, faithful, and able beyond any of its predecessors.”

The patronage appointments and the unscrupulous tactics continued in 1865, as Congress debated the terms of Reconstruction. Democrats tried to block the proposed Thirteenth Amendment, which would abolish slavery. Radical Republicans resisted the reinstatement of Southern congressmen, and pushed for a federal agency to protect former slaves. Lincoln and Seward, who tried to arbitrate between the two extremes, were determined to get the amendment through the House. They offered political positions to editors who supported it, and Seward hired disreputable lobbyists to secure the votes of resistant Democrats and ambivalent border-state Unionists. On January 31, 1865, the amendment passed. Unlike the Emancipation Proclamation, it had the power of law, and Seward predicted, prematurely, that the process of Reconstruction was almost complete.

Stahr writes with understated pathos of the terrible events that came later that year, when Seward was tested “as few men are ever tested.” On April 5th, Seward embarked with several members of his family to meet Lincoln near Richmond, where the prospect of serious peace talks beckoned. Not far from home, the door to the carriage flew open, and when the driver dismounted to secure it the horses bolted. Seward leaped out, attempting to grab the reins. Instead, he fell and was carried back to his house unconscious. He had fractured his lower jaw and his right arm, and the doctor considered his condition “perilous in the extreme.” Late one night nine days later, at virtually the same moment that Lincoln was shot in his box at Ford’s Theatre, Seward was stabbed in bed by one of John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators, a former Confederate soldier. Seward survived, but his son Augustus was injured, and Frederick, beaten over the head with the attacker’s revolver, was in a coma for several days. Frances Seward, already frail, was undone by caring for her family and by the assassination of Lincoln. She died two months later, at the age of fifty-nine.

The following year, Seward’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Fanny, died of tuberculosis. Devastated, badly scarred, and noticeably aged, Seward nevertheless continued as Secretary of State. This gives him, as Stahr puts it, “the curious distinction of having worked with and admired both Abraham Lincoln, considered one of the greatest if not the greatest of all American presidents, and Andrew Johnson, generally considered one of the worst.” Johnson was a former Democrat from Tennessee, with a boorish manner and blundering political instincts. The Chicago Tribune was not alone in thinking that Seward had “effectually committed political suicide” by agreeing to stay on. A member of the House from Pennsylvania compared him to an old English hunting dog, tolerated because he “never bit the hand that fed him.”

In early 1867, as Radicals in Congress pursued impeachment efforts against Johnson, Seward tried both to beat them back and to persuade the President to tone down remarks in his annual message that berated Congress for forcing Southern states to accept the black vote. But Johnson, who believed that blacks had “shown less capacity for government than any other race of people,” ignored his advice. Seward was exasperated by Johnson, but he agreed, Stahr writes, “that the southern states should be allowed to govern themselves, and to rejoin the national government, without undue delay or onerous conditions.”

Seward persisted, too, in order to act upon his long-held ambitions for the American empire. After helping to preserve the Republic, he now set out to expand it. Since the eighteen-fifties, he had been advocating trade with East Asia. On a political tour with Johnson in the summer of 1867, Seward told an audience in Hartford, to vigorous applause, that the people of the United States had before them the “most glorious” prospect “that ever dawned upon any nation on the globe,” of a free nation “extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and approaching the shores of Japan and China.” He negotiated treaties with Japan, the Sandwich Islands, Madagascar, and Venezuela. “Nothing could be more important in regard to the growth of American influence and the extension of American power in the future.” Eventually, Seward was also vindicated in his determination to acquire the strategically important territories of Hawaii, the Panama Canal Zone, and Alaska.

Not, however, without engaging in some more diplomatic chicanery. He wanted Congress to pass a treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska, but his power had waned. In September, 1868, he admitted separately to the President and to an American diplomat that the Russian Ambassador, Édouard de Stoeckl, had siphoned two hundred thousand dollars from the Treasury Department’s seven-million-dollar check to Russia for the acquisition of the territory. The man had some incidental expenses to square away. The editor of the Daily Morning Chronicle requested thirty thousand dollars in return for his support of the treaty, and Stoeckl paid thousands of dollars to ten members of Congress to win their votes. A few months later, when a House investigating committee questioned Seward about the bribes, he denied knowing anything about them. Stahr finds the evidence that Seward perjured himself “troubling,” but reminds us, “Seward was not a saint, he was a practical politician, and he was prepared if necessary to use dubious means to achieve great goals.” One of the achievements of Stahr’s subtle portrait of this confounding figure is that, in the end, our sense of Seward’s charm, and even of his integrity, survives roughly intact.

Although Seward retired at the age of sixty-eight, in 1869, when Grant assumed the Presidency, he continued to be, as Frances had described him a quarter century earlier, “the most indefatigable of men.” He said, “At my age, and in my condition of health, ‘rest was rust,’ and nothing remained, to prevent rust, but to keep in motion.” Still suffering from pain in his face and neck, his hands crippled, and paralysis creeping up his arms, he went on a journey with his family on the newly opened transcontinental railroad—a cause that he had championed in the Senate—and then on to British Columbia, Alaska, Cuba, and Mexico. He returned home for five months before setting off for Japan, China, and Europe with the two daughters of an old political friend. There had been speculation that he would marry one of them, twenty-four-year-old Olive Risley, whom he had been seeing regularly in Washington. (One paper, alluding to the age difference, described Seward as “amiable, sportive, frisky, foxy.”) Instead, Seward adopted her, thus preëmpting any stories about the impropriety of travelling with two very young women. After the trip, he finally settled down in Auburn, where he worked with Olive on a book about their journeys, and received frequent visitors at home.

Seward’s devoted young friend Henry Adams enjoyed observing “the old fellow” at dinner “rolling out his grand broad ideas that would inspire a cow with statesmanship if she understood our language.” He later wrote of Seward that it was difficult to tell “how much was nature and how much was mask.” Seward was maligned alternately as an extremist and as a temporizer. He broke the law to help fugitive slaves, yet made concessions that he found personally unconscionable in order to preserve the Union. A man who literally bore the scars of a violently divided society nonetheless held on to a grandiose vision of American destiny and insured that the contours of a young nation were expanded. He was mocked for his boundless self-regard, but there was one man he came to admire even more.

When Lincoln returned from Virginia on the evening of Robert E. Lee’s official surrender, April 9, 1865, he went directly to visit Seward, who was recuperating from the carriage accident. Frederick recalled that “the gas-lights were turned down low, and the house was still, every one moving softly, and speaking in whispers.” Lincoln sat down on the bed. Seward, his face wrapped in bandages, whispered, “ ‘You are back from Richmond?’ ‘Yes,’ said Lincoln, ‘and I think we are near the end at last.’ ”

Less than a week later, Lincoln was dead and Seward and two of his sons were struggling to survive. But that night was marked by hope. Frederick recounts how the President, “leaning his tall form across the bed, and resting on his elbow,” lay down beside Seward. Lincoln talked about visiting a Union hospital earlier that day and shaking the hands of hundreds of patients. “He spoke of having worked as hard at it as sawing wood,” Fanny recorded in her diary, “and seemed, in his goodness of heart, much satisfied at the labor.”

It is easy to imagine the moment: the two canny politicians quietly reassuring each other that the country would soon be reunited and the virulent animosities of the war fade away. A few days after the 1864 election, Seward had addressed a crowd gathered at his house in Washington. According to newspaper accounts, he said that everyone would soon see Lincoln as “a true patriot, benevolent and loyal, honest and faithful. Hereafter, all motive of detraction of him would cease to exist, and Abraham Lincoln would take his place with Washington, Jefferson, and Adams, among the benefactors of his country and the human race.” This was not rote political rhetoric. He believed every word. ♦

Dorothy Wickenden has been the executive editor of The New Yorker since January 1996.